Iraq's Trajectory a Year After Elections

This episode explores the recent election of Salahuddin’s governor and what it signals about cross-sectarian coalition-building in Iraq’s evolving political landscape. The hosts analyze the growing generational divide between Iraq's old guard politicians and emerging younger lead ... Show More

The outgoing government recently claimed it had met 88% of the targets set out in its three-year Government Program, even as it announced emergency austerity measures. In this episode, we scrutinize the credibility of that performance rating and examine the deeper fiscal reality ... Show More

This episode examines the ongoing political deadlock in Iraq's government formation process following President Trump's controversial social media post opposing Nouri Al-Maliki's nomination for prime minister. The hosts analyze the impasse within the Coordination Framework, Sudan ... Show More

<p>On Monday August 29th, Iraq came closer to civil war than it has for year. The fears of many Iraqis that political tensions would spill out into violence were coming true.</p> <p>After 11 months of parliamentary elections, government formation is still help up by complete poli ... Show More

This week on Babel, Jon speaks with Dr. Haider al-Abadi, an Iraqi politician who served as prime minister from 2014 to 2018, while the country was battling the Islamic State Group (ISG). They talk about his decision making as prime minister, the Iraqi government's response to the ... Show More

This week Jon is joined by Hassan Hassan, director of the program on non-state actors in geopolitics at the Center for Global Policy and the editor-in-chief of its new online journal, Newlines Magazine. Hassan talks to Jon about his late colleague, Hisham al-Hashimi, and the rese ... Show More

In a special episode of Babel to mark the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, Jon sits down with two Iraqi guests to talk about the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion. Dr. Marsin Alshamary is a research fellow with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard's Belfer Cen ... Show More

Michigan’s primary today will test President Biden’s viability with Muslim voters amid the war in Gaza. One Arab American leader says the community is abandoning Biden and looking for alternatives — Donald Trump might be one of them. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edi ... Show More

In this roundtable discussion our editors examine how the past year has progressed, discuss how things may go over the next year and consider a few fundamentally positive truths about the whole conflict. Meanwhile our senior producer travels through Ukraine, getting a measure of ... Show More

Why are younger voters around the world turning their back on democracy in favour of strongman leaders who are prepared to defy parliaments?In a year when more than two billion people in 50 countries will go to the polls – the biggest global election year in history – Amol and Ni ... Show More